Forum: Featured Discussions: Conversations on Wisdom: Krista Tippett

By Jean Matelski Boulware Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and New York Times best-selling author. In 2014, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence

By Jean Matelski Boulware

Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and New York Times best-selling author. In 2014, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” On Being pursues concepts of wisdom and knowledge while focusing on aspects of moral imagination to encompass poetry and nuance to understand the depths of wise action and thought in religion, politics, and culture. Her TedTalk has more than half a million views and focuses on compassion; while her book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Livingdelves into aspects of virtue, wisdom, and hope. She recently finished a book tour when we caught up with her in mid-April.
In this interview, Tippett discusses developing wisdom, exemplars of wisdom, and the role of science in understanding wisdom.

Jean: How do you define wisdom?

Tippett: What I have come to with that, is that wisdom is connected to many other qualities. It certainly can be connected to intelligence and knowledge and accomplishments. Those are the things we often point at when we look at great people. For me, the measure of a wise life is the imprint it makes on the people around it, on the world around it. Something like intelligence or knowledge is a possession that you can point at. You can say that is a knowledgeable person or there is an intelligence there. I think wisdom radiates outward as well.

Jean: Do you think that some of those characteristics could be taught as a skill to help people at some point later to achieve wisdom?

Tippett: I think that felt to me like the most urgent message by the end of the writing that this is something that we can cultivate in ourselves. We can practice and we can become. In that, I believe that we are really supported and taught by what neuroscience is learning about the way our brains work. Neuroscience is revealing that essentially what we practice we become. I have seen it and I believe it to be true. The same thing is true for playing the piano or throwing a ball. We can aspire and orient ourselves and practice being. There are many different qualities of a wise life and every wise life is not the same, but compassion, patience, empathy, kindness, generosity, hospitality…these are qualities we can create muscle memory around.

I also think we have this very simplistic saying of old and wise. Certainly, there is something very special about wisdom that is embodied in a life of a person who has lived a long life and assimilated so much across that life. [However] I think that wisdom can manifest across the life span. I think most of us have experienced a four-year-old who blew us away, the way children can ask really the ultimate questions. I think there's a wisdom of the teen years and the early twenties in the clash with this moment of seeing the world full and having an urgency about making that real. So, this is not the domain just of the few.

Jean: Are there any people you would consider to be exemplars of wisdom?

Tippett: There are so many people. I think that there are the famous wise people. I supposed I would say sitting with Desmond Tutu or Jean Vanier or Thich Nhat Hanh or Wangari Maathai who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the environmentalist. There are people who come to mind who are just very large lives, but I was just at a conference in Seattle with maybe six hundred people from all over the country who are working on being generative forces in civil society, common life. The world is full of wisdom. I really do think this is everywhere. I always say to people, we have these ideas in our heads of these icons of wisdom. They are often very far away. But I think you can ask any person to think of the wisest people they have known and there will be someone in their family or in their community. We have these images in our head. I think that's important to also realize, to attend to that, and then think about what were the qualities of that person. I also think that if you ask most people to think of the wisest people they know, the image they have of that person, they will probably have a smile on their face. That sense of humor and an ability to smile including at oneself is a really core quality of this too or a result of it.

Jean: In your book Speaking of Faith, you touch on spirituality. To what extent do you think wisdom depends on spirituality?

Tippett: I think it's true with wisdom, but even more true with spirituality…the language itself is kind of vague; just in the sense that it means different things to different people. You have to define what you're talking about. I wouldn't say you have to be a religious person to be a wise person, but I would say that spirituality is about inner life and inner work, cultivating inner depths and interior depths. That is absolutely a quality of any of these wise people, any of them I can think of.

Jean: You open Einstein's God by stating: "To insist that Science and Religion speak the same language or draw the same conclusions is to miss the point of both of these pursuits of cohesive knowledge and underlying truth." Do you think that science might play a role in understanding wisdom?

Tippett: I am just utterly fascinated by the ground we're on now where so many scientists in different fields from clinical psychology to social psychology to neuroscience or even evolutionary biology are kind of putting the virtues of the ages under the microscope or taking them into the laboratory. Virtues [and] the kind of array of virtues, these are also building blocks of wisdom. Any wise life embodies not all of them, but some or many of them, whether they call them virtues or not. It's fascinating to me that we live in this moment where scientists without any desire to be studying religion or spirituality or even wisdom, scientists who are studying what makes for healthy communities, what makes for human well-being and flourishing, what makes us as interesting and strange as we are…they are studying qualities like empathy, creativity, compassion and even something like awe. That to me is a whole new kind of companionship and interplay between the scientific enterprise and the human enterprise that I think is really good for us.

I love Michael McCullough'swork in Florida on gratitude and forgiveness; looking at the revenge instinct in us but also the forgiveness instinct. The fact is revealing how the work that is to be done is to create the conditions for something like forgiveness to be more instinctive. So that is practical intelligence about the exercise of qualities of a wise life and of a spiritual life that the spiritual traditions couldn't have come to on their own in quite the same way.

Jean: There has been some debate as to whether or not a person can be wise but then also at the same time be destructive (see wisdom and evil). What are your thoughts on that?

Tippett: Well, because we are a bundle of contradictions and a wise human would still be a human. I have no doubt that even the greatest human being could contradict themselves. There are two words in the title of my book, becoming and wise. The becoming word is just as important as the wise part. This is not a destination. It's a process. It's a work of a lifetime.

Look at somebody like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I would say their one of these historic wise people and participated in a plot to kill Hitler. You could argue, of course, he was killing a tyrant but that was not a choice that could have moral purity. That is also a situation of the human condition.

What wisdom insists on is also discernment and reflection and cultivating qualities of being in the world so that when we are in these situations in human life, some of which will not have a pure choice of good or bad. We live in a very complicated world but this is about living in a way, cultivating ourselves in a way that we can meet those moments as wisely as possible but that's never going to be about perfection as long as we are these creatures we are.

Jean: Could you offer some of your own personal wisdom or practical advice for managing our lives on the day to day in this world of great uncertainty?

Tippett: It's a very fraught moment. A lot of people, in varying degrees, feel the ground beneath our feet has shifted. It has, but the truth is some of us who are privileged enough have been living with an illusion of kind of a status quo that had some certainties to it. And that had this arc of progress to it that was unassailable. In fact, that wasn't reality based and it wasn't compassionate enough. I feel a great wakefulness. I feel that people are really awake, paying attention, and looking inside themselves and asking searchingly, ‘How did I contribute to where we are now?’ That is one of the paradoxical things about us, about human life. The wisest people would say that it is in these moments when things don't go as planned, when things go wrong, when life surprises us and disappoints us, that we have these openings. How we approach these moments, whether they're personal or public is how we shape ourselves. These are the moments when we become who we are.

This is one of those moments where there's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of fear. There's some danger. There's been danger all along as well. There's also possibility that wasn't there before. The language of resistance is out there. There's a lot of reactive emotion and language all around, on all sides. I think some of the input of wisdom right now would be very quiet. I think the calling to wisdom right now is partly very straightforward to be kind of calmers of fear to say, "How do we need to be? What conditions do we need to create right now to rise to our best selves, for me to be my best self, and for me to call others to their best selves?" Some of that work is going to be simple and about getting grounded, recollected, and what am I taking in? That's what occurs to me. It's a big moment. I feel very hopeful about what can come out of this moment.

Jean Matelski Boulware

By Jean Matelski Boulware Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and New York Times best-selling author. In 2014, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence

By Jean Matelski Boulware

Krista Tippett is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster and New York Times best-selling author. In 2014, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” On Being pursues concepts of wisdom and knowledge while focusing on aspects of moral imagination to encompass poetry and nuance to understand the depths of wise action and thought in religion, politics, and culture. Her TedTalk has more than half a million views and focuses on compassion; while her book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Livingdelves into aspects of virtue, wisdom, and hope. She recently finished a book tour when we caught up with her in mid-April.
In this interview, Tippett discusses developing wisdom, exemplars of wisdom, and the role of science in understanding wisdom.

Jean: How do you define wisdom?

Tippett: What I have come to with that, is that wisdom is connected to many other qualities. It certainly can be connected to intelligence and knowledge and accomplishments. Those are the things we often point at when we look at great people. For me, the measure of a wise life is the imprint it makes on the people around it, on the world around it. Something like intelligence or knowledge is a possession that you can point at. You can say that is a knowledgeable person or there is an intelligence there. I think wisdom radiates outward as well.

Jean: Do you think that some of those characteristics could be taught as a skill to help people at some point later to achieve wisdom?

Tippett: I think that felt to me like the most urgent message by the end of the writing that this is something that we can cultivate in ourselves. We can practice and we can become. In that, I believe that we are really supported and taught by what neuroscience is learning about the way our brains work. Neuroscience is revealing that essentially what we practice we become. I have seen it and I believe it to be true. The same thing is true for playing the piano or throwing a ball. We can aspire and orient ourselves and practice being. There are many different qualities of a wise life and every wise life is not the same, but compassion, patience, empathy, kindness, generosity, hospitality…these are qualities we can create muscle memory around.

I also think we have this very simplistic saying of old and wise. Certainly, there is something very special about wisdom that is embodied in a life of a person who has lived a long life and assimilated so much across that life. [However] I think that wisdom can manifest across the life span. I think most of us have experienced a four-year-old who blew us away, the way children can ask really the ultimate questions. I think there's a wisdom of the teen years and the early twenties in the clash with this moment of seeing the world full and having an urgency about making that real. So, this is not the domain just of the few.

Jean: Are there any people you would consider to be exemplars of wisdom?

Tippett: There are so many people. I think that there are the famous wise people. I supposed I would say sitting with Desmond Tutu or Jean Vanier or Thich Nhat Hanh or Wangari Maathai who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the environmentalist. There are people who come to mind who are just very large lives, but I was just at a conference in Seattle with maybe six hundred people from all over the country who are working on being generative forces in civil society, common life. The world is full of wisdom. I really do think this is everywhere. I always say to people, we have these ideas in our heads of these icons of wisdom. They are often very far away. But I think you can ask any person to think of the wisest people they have known and there will be someone in their family or in their community. We have these images in our head. I think that's important to also realize, to attend to that, and then think about what were the qualities of that person. I also think that if you ask most people to think of the wisest people they know, the image they have of that person, they will probably have a smile on their face. That sense of humor and an ability to smile including at oneself is a really core quality of this too or a result of it.

Jean: In your book Speaking of Faith, you touch on spirituality. To what extent do you think wisdom depends on spirituality?

Tippett: I think it's true with wisdom, but even more true with spirituality…the language itself is kind of vague; just in the sense that it means different things to different people. You have to define what you're talking about. I wouldn't say you have to be a religious person to be a wise person, but I would say that spirituality is about inner life and inner work, cultivating inner depths and interior depths. That is absolutely a quality of any of these wise people, any of them I can think of.

Jean: You open Einstein's God by stating: "To insist that Science and Religion speak the same language or draw the same conclusions is to miss the point of both of these pursuits of cohesive knowledge and underlying truth." Do you think that science might play a role in understanding wisdom?

Tippett: I am just utterly fascinated by the ground we're on now where so many scientists in different fields from clinical psychology to social psychology to neuroscience or even evolutionary biology are kind of putting the virtues of the ages under the microscope or taking them into the laboratory. Virtues [and] the kind of array of virtues, these are also building blocks of wisdom. Any wise life embodies not all of them, but some or many of them, whether they call them virtues or not. It's fascinating to me that we live in this moment where scientists without any desire to be studying religion or spirituality or even wisdom, scientists who are studying what makes for healthy communities, what makes for human well-being and flourishing, what makes us as interesting and strange as we are…they are studying qualities like empathy, creativity, compassion and even something like awe. That to me is a whole new kind of companionship and interplay between the scientific enterprise and the human enterprise that I think is really good for us.

I love Michael McCullough'swork in Florida on gratitude and forgiveness; looking at the revenge instinct in us but also the forgiveness instinct. The fact is revealing how the work that is to be done is to create the conditions for something like forgiveness to be more instinctive. So that is practical intelligence about the exercise of qualities of a wise life and of a spiritual life that the spiritual traditions couldn't have come to on their own in quite the same way.

Jean: There has been some debate as to whether or not a person can be wise but then also at the same time be destructive (see wisdom and evil). What are your thoughts on that?

Tippett: Well, because we are a bundle of contradictions and a wise human would still be a human. I have no doubt that even the greatest human being could contradict themselves. There are two words in the title of my book, becoming and wise. The becoming word is just as important as the wise part. This is not a destination. It's a process. It's a work of a lifetime.

Look at somebody like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who I would say their one of these historic wise people and participated in a plot to kill Hitler. You could argue, of course, he was killing a tyrant but that was not a choice that could have moral purity. That is also a situation of the human condition.

What wisdom insists on is also discernment and reflection and cultivating qualities of being in the world so that when we are in these situations in human life, some of which will not have a pure choice of good or bad. We live in a very complicated world but this is about living in a way, cultivating ourselves in a way that we can meet those moments as wisely as possible but that's never going to be about perfection as long as we are these creatures we are.

Jean: Could you offer some of your own personal wisdom or practical advice for managing our lives on the day to day in this world of great uncertainty?

Tippett: It's a very fraught moment. A lot of people, in varying degrees, feel the ground beneath our feet has shifted. It has, but the truth is some of us who are privileged enough have been living with an illusion of kind of a status quo that had some certainties to it. And that had this arc of progress to it that was unassailable. In fact, that wasn't reality based and it wasn't compassionate enough. I feel a great wakefulness. I feel that people are really awake, paying attention, and looking inside themselves and asking searchingly, ‘How did I contribute to where we are now?’ That is one of the paradoxical things about us, about human life. The wisest people would say that it is in these moments when things don't go as planned, when things go wrong, when life surprises us and disappoints us, that we have these openings. How we approach these moments, whether they're personal or public is how we shape ourselves. These are the moments when we become who we are.

This is one of those moments where there's a lot of confusion and there's a lot of fear. There's some danger. There's been danger all along as well. There's also possibility that wasn't there before. The language of resistance is out there. There's a lot of reactive emotion and language all around, on all sides. I think some of the input of wisdom right now would be very quiet. I think the calling to wisdom right now is partly very straightforward to be kind of calmers of fear to say, "How do we need to be? What conditions do we need to create right now to rise to our best selves, for me to be my best self, and for me to call others to their best selves?" Some of that work is going to be simple and about getting grounded, recollected, and what am I taking in? That's what occurs to me. It's a big moment. I feel very hopeful about what can come out of this moment.

Ron Krumpos

Spirituality is sometimes defined as an “attempt to grow in sensitivity to self, to others, to non-human creation, and to God who is both within and beyond this totality.” In practice, spirituality will often “cultivate tranquility, mindfulness and insight

Spirituality is sometimes defined as an “attempt to grow in sensitivity to self, to others, to non-human creation, and to God who is both within and beyond this totality.” In practice, spirituality will often “cultivate tranquility, mindfulness and insight, leading to virtues of wisdom and compassion.” You do not, however, have to believe in God to possess those qualities.

Mike Collins

" The wisest people would say that it is in these moments when things don't go as planned, when things go wrong...How we approach these moments...These are the moments when we become who we are." The Bible however, indicates just the opposite

"The wisest people would
say that it is in these moments when things don't go as planned, when
things go wrong...How we approach these moments...These are the moments when we
become who we are."

The Bible however, indicates just the opposite, that it's during the good times that we become who we are. And that it's what we learn during the good times, which will determine how we respond when things are going badly.

Bad situations however, will help us to see who we are, but it has not been my experience that they help us to become who we are.

So the question to ask I think is, who are we becoming when things are going well? And the way to determine that, is to understand whether our pride is ruling us, or humility. For if our pride is ruling us when things are going well, it will most certainly rule us when things aren't.